following inquiries, and promises to give the results obtained at some future meeting of the association:
"1. Have you personally ever known any ease where thorough-bred short-horn cattle, because of climate, poor feed, neglect, or any other cause, have become in character any thing else than short-horns—in other words, where from any cause thorough-bred short-horns have degenerated into animals of any other breed or type?
"2. Do you personally know of thoroughbred animals of any other breeds so changing or reverting?
"3. Have you ever heard of such a thing taking place, in the experience of other breeders, so well authenticated that you believe it to be a fact? "
The professor concludes his circular with the following remarks: "That grade animals often 'revert,' that curious freaks and 'sports' often attend violent crossing (and also that breeds deteriorate under bad management or bad conditions), are well enough known, but these facts do not affect the specific questions asked where the blood is supposed to be kept strictly pure."
Laborers' Homes.—Dr. Stephen Smith, in an address to the New York Public Health and Dwelling Reform Associations, points out various methods of improving the homes of the laboring classes in this city. He holds that every family almost may own a house for itself, and instances the city of Philadelphia, where tenement-houses are unknown, and where the day-laborer may, and does, occupy a house which is, or is in process of becoming, his own property. In the city of New York, south of the Harlem River, it is impossible for the poor to build houses, unless there be such a reconstruction of the land as will diminish the cost of individual lots, and allow of a larger number of single houses to the acre. Dr. Smith favors the plan of single rows of dwellings fronting at both extremities upon streets. Blocks thus laid out would have no inclosed courts, the dwellings would be flushed with free currents of air on both sides, and a much larger number of people could be accommodated in the same area.
The system of building associations, such as exist in Philadelphia, is highly commended by Dr. Smith. The relation of the laborer to the building association is thus stated: "He borrows $1,000 in cash, agreeing to pay $1,200 and the interest; he stands charged with $1,200, paying $60 per annum: it would take twenty years to pay up $1,200. But at the end of the time, his share being worth $1,200, he stops paying, and the house is his own. In fact, however, he is a participant in the profits, the premium and the interest he pays going to reimburse himself, and it only takes in practice ten or twelve years to put him in absolute possession of his home." Dr. Smith's address is worthy the attention of all classes; it is published in full in the Sanitarian for July.
In London, too, there exist various associations whose object is to provide improved dwellings for the laboring classes. At the present time these associations own 7,558 improved dwellings, capable of containing a population of 36,078. The buildings have been erected at a cost of about $6,000,000, and the enterprise is an undoubted financial success. But regarded from the sanitary and moral point of view the results are still more satisfactory. That the moral well-being of the inhabitants is promoted by the enlarged provision made in the model lodging-houses for the decencies of life is self-evident. The sanitary advantages possessed by these dwellings will be seen from a comparison of their death-rate with the death-rate of England in general, of London, or of any district of London. "There is not one year," says the Sanitary Record, "in which the death-rate prevailing in the model lodging-houses is not much lower than in England, and in the country, city, and town districts with which it is brought into comparison. Take, for instance, the healthy year 1868; it shows a death-rate in the model lodging-houses of 15 per 1,000, the most favorable figure for any mixed population of male and female being 22—a difference of 7 per 1,000 in favor of the model dwellings." It is a very significant fact that whereas in 1874 the death-rate of children under ten in the general population of London was 48 per 1,000, in the lodging-houses it was only 24 per 1,000. And the saving of disease must be in the like proportion. But yet in these dwellings the population is
